A brief guide to research on FBI activity in Latin America in the 1940s

Through a program called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), from 1940 to 1947 the FBI placed about 700 agents in Latin America. The original justification for the program was to combat German nazi influence in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The program quickly spread to other countries, and expanded to include domestic communists.

The best place to start a study is with the FBI’s own institutional history that it published in 1947 to justify the program: History of the Special Intelligence Service Division. The FBI has a partially redacted pdf of the book on their website http://vault.fbi.gov/special-intelligence-service. That website also includes pdfs of the FBI’s annual reports on the SIS program from 1941 to 1947.

I conducted the bulk of my research in the Department of State Central Files (Record Group 59) at the National Archives Records Administration (NARA) in, College Park, Maryland. For an introduction to research in the national archives, see https://www.archives.gov/dc-metro/college-park/.

Interviews with some of the agents in Latin America are also available on the FBI Oral Histories page at the National Law Enforcement Museum website http://www.nleomf.org/museum/the-collection/oral-histories/. This list is in alphabetical order, and some searching is required to find those who worked in Latin America in the 1940s.

Most authors who examine FBI counterintelligence efforts in Latin America limit their attention to the perceived German nazi menace that originally justified the agency’s presence. Among the best of these works are:

Even though little has been written about the FBI in Latin America in the 1940s, and a very large literature exists on the FBI that provides a solid basis for further study. The best known of these is an institutional history that Hoover authorized: